Retail establishments and product manufacturers are often interested in the shopping activities, behaviors, and/or habits of consumers. Consumer activity related to shopping can be used to correlate product sales with particular shopping behaviors and/or to improve timings or placements of product offerings, product promotions, and/or advertisements. Known techniques for monitoring consumer shopping activities include conducting surveys, counting patrons, and/or conducting visual inspections of shoppers or patrons in the retail establishments.
Trade promotions for consumer goods often result in additional or incremental unit sales of a product in the week the trade promotion is run. This effect can be referred to as the pantry loading effect, which is associated with the tendency of consumers to stock up their households with those products to which trade promotions apply. Although the pantry loading effect may result from a sudden increase in product sales at a particular time when a promotion on that product was run, this effect often causes consumers to delay subsequent purchases of that same product. Thus, although offering trade promotions provides retailers and manufacturers a means by which to move large volumes of stock in a short amount of time, such promotions often result in a reduction of later purchases leading to lowering sales trends in subsequent weeks. Reduced sales volumes are often attributed to numerous factors. That is, the pantry loading effect may not be the only factor leading to reduced sales.